I remember being a kid and reading the newspaper comic strips every day. Not all of them. Doonesbury was one I typically didn’t read because it had too many words. I guess if I wasn’t spoiled for choice, I’d have read it no matter what. Back then, I read anything that had a cartoon aspect to it. Ernie Ball Strings & Things catalogs had a cartoon feature in them of an Eagle and his son explaining the guitar business. I didn’t know diddly about guitars and stuff, but by golly, I read and re-read that stuff ’cause it was well-drawn cartoons.

I saw the Ernie Ball material at my dad’s store over the summer holidays when I was too young to be left on my own, both parents were working and anyone else who could look after my brother and me were otherwise occupied. That’s also where I first saw a Doonesbury treasury book. Big thick book full of comic strips. Amazing. One of the guitar teachers had brought it in. I ignored it as long as I could but after a certain point, it was a book full of comic strips. It had to be read, and I had a summer in a store full of stuff I didn’t know diddly about.

And that’s how I lost my fear of “too-wordy” comic strips. The book was the one where, lost in the midst of all the other cartoons, an American couple adopts a Vietnamese baby, who cries about the black specks in her oatmeal ’til it’s pointed out that they’re just raisins. Doonesbury-style, she looks back into the bowl thinking, “I thought that was shrapnel.” The baby’s name was Kim. I’m convinced that she eventually became the Kim that Mike Doonesbury married and started the Mikim company with. That comic strip has been telling stories for a long, long time.

Makes Hubris’ six years and piddly few words seem like a drop in the ol’ bucket.

“Why” is sometimes a question that can shorten the heck out of a conversation. I mean, some of the videos on those old TV shows that were just collections of videos… (and the ones on Facebook now) are things you can’t question if you don’t want the magic taken away. For instance, I watched a video collage (is that what you call those? The ones that have a series of little videos strung together into one larger, funnier video) the other day of people doing face plants in various places.

One of the face plants was a woman going down an escalator and suddenly, whump, she goes down and scatters herself badly by the time she gets to the bottom of the moving stairs. Fine. But then you ask “Why”.

As in, “Why was there someone video-ing this woman (from behind) going down what is apparently an airport escalator?” It’s not security video. There’s no one else in frame. There’s nothing especially engaging about the woman one way or the other. But the video shows us this spectacular stumble and splatter… halfway down the escalator. Why, when the first half of the escalator ride was so uneventful, would someone continue video-ing this person… Unless she and the videographer had agreed beforehand that she would do something interesting on the ride down?

So here WE are with Lowell confronting the question, “Why”.

Let’s see if he can prove the videographer to be essential to the process.

You know that weird sense of decade that you get as you watch old movies? More and more, you see stuff in movies where you go, “Why didn’t they just pull out a cell phone and…” And then you remember that we, as a species, have not been able to capture random events going on anywhere we like, or call for help while in nearly any place we choose, or google when a movie was made and go “Oh, my God… Was that really THIRTY YEARS ago? I could have sworn this movie was only five years ago.”

So, in a few years this comic will seem so weird. “Why wouldn’t they let people with recording gear around? It’s not like the SmartWalls weren’t recording every event in human history, right? When was this comic made, anyhow?”